Strength Training for Basketball
— Application of Rippetoe’s Two Factor Model of Sports Performance
One common physical attribute Wilt Chamberlain and Shaquille O’Neal, arguably the two most dominant Basketball players of all-times, had in common is their extraordinary strength. Being the most forceful player of their respective eras certainly was a big advantage and contributed immensely to their on-court success. It is well known that improving your strength offers many benefits to any sport, not just Basketball, which is why literally every higher class athlete incorporates some sort of resistance training in his programming. While only very few have the genetic predispositions for herculean strength like Wilt and Shaq, everybody can and to a certain degree should increase their strength. Of course, as with almost everything, there is a diminishing marginal return in becoming stronger but there is a period in everyone’s training career in which they are playing catch up to their physical potential for strength.
That being said, what is the most effective way to train for basketball-specific strength? It might come as a surprise but I claim that sport-specific strength training is mostly irrelevant for the vast majority of athletes. Due to the generality of the underlying physical adaptation, the most effective way to build strength for basketball equals that of building strength for Olympic Weightlifting or any other sport, per se. In the following, I will explain why that is and lay out what a useful training plan looks like.
First of all, the ideas I am about to expand on are neither new nor have they been created by me. They are summerized from the books [1,2] and numerous articles [3,4,5] of Mark Rippetoe et al. Now let’s begin with elaborating on why physical strength even matters. Since strength can be defined as the ability to produce force against an external resistance, it becomes obvious that for every physical interaction with the environment we depend on strength. In that regard, strength is the general basis for athletic prowess.
The acquisition of strength can best be explained through the stress, recovery, adaptation (SRA) model: A stress is imposed on the body forcing it to adapt, but only if the stress is designed properly and a sufficient recovery period has occurred. In terms of strength, training is the stress which has to be applied and fulfill the following three criteria:
- It has to produce the specific adaptation you aim for, i.e. improvement of force production,
- it has to be of a magnitude you are not yet adapted to
- you have to be able to recover from it.
There are quite some physical adaptations preceding strength improvements. Muscles grow larger and also the skeletal system, the ligaments, tendons, fascia, as well as cartilage undergo changes to become better suited to deal with heavy loads. To a more limited ability, the neuromuscular system adapts, too. Motor pathways are quickly established that make movement patterns more efficient and motor units become easier to recruit into contraction.
The underlying adaptations necessary for improving force production are mostly of general nature so it is only logical that training for it most effectively should also be general — i.e. independent of the sport. To better understand that concept, Rippetoe has introduced the Two Factor Model of Sports Performance [3]. He states that there are “two components to the effective preparation for improved performance in the vast majority of athletic events — Training and Practice.”
Training is described by Rippetoe as “the process of accumulating specific physiological adaptations necessary for improved performance in an athletic event” [3]. These adaptations can be predominantly metabolic (as in endurance-based sports), structural, (as in sports involving maximal effort), or a combination of the two (as in almost every field sport like basketball). The paramount concept is that these physiological adaptations are independent of specific movement patterns. They are non-specific adaptations across the entire body and therefore are best developed using the movement patterns that most effectively apply the stress — not the ones that look the most like the sport in which the adaptation will be used.
Practice is described by Rippetoe as “the repetitive execution of movements that depend on accuracy and precision under the conditions in which they will be displayed during the performance” [3]. In that regard, as opposed to Training, Practice must be sport-specific. The ability to execute movement patterns with accuracy and precision is called skill and its development is the purpose of Practice. Both Practice and Training are two separate preparatory measures to improve performance.
Let’s apply that concept to Basketball. A basketball weighs about 22 ounces (620g) which is why shooting, passing, and ball-handling practice is accomplished with a 22-ounce basketball. Yet some coaches advocate using a heavy basketball or even a medicine ball even though utilizing a heavy ball necessitates shooting with bigger force or throwing passes more slowly. Therefore this is not Practice for the movement patterns used in the performance with regular equipment and, even worse, it is Practice for the wrong movement pattern.
The thought behind using a heavier ball might be that it makes you stronger. But obviously, strength cannot be improved by adding a couple of ounces to a 22-ounce ball because that tiny amount of additional weight is not enough to improve the force production capacity of the muscles involved in shooting or passing. I can confirm this from own experience: A long time before I knew about all this I also experimented with playing Basketball with a medicine ball. It neither helped me to become stronger nor did my shooting become more accurate — it only made my wrists hurt from throwing and catching a heavy ball.
On the other hand, adding 10s and even 100s of pounds to compound barbell movements like the Squat, Deadlift, Press, and Bench Press significantly improves total strength without interfering with the motor pathway used in the on-court skills.
Often, the basic compound barbell lifts which have the distinct advantage of being programmable for long-term strength increases are replaced with a wide variety of athletic-looking exercises that cannot be effectively trained for strength and that are not Practice, either. The bias for those athletic-looking exercises stems from the idea to train your explosiveness, reaction time, agility, and associated characteristics. According to Rippetoe [3] and also my limited experience, the problem is that those athletic abilities are extremely dependent on genetics and thus are not very trainable beyond enhancements that are inherent to improvements of force production — i.e. strength. This observation renders the various devices designed to miraculously enhance your jumping power, to the point that you will be easily able to perform a dunk, practically useless.
That being said, there is the “principle of specificity”, after all, which is a general strength and conditioning principle that describes the observation that strength gains are larger for exercises we use and smaller in similar exercises that use the same muscle groups [6]. So you could argue that the ability to produce force also depends on the relevant muscle length, speed, and contraction type. While those specifics theoretically could be trained for, it is well established that strength increases in some occasions are quite similar when tested in many different ways and thus do not strictly follow the guideline of sport specificity. Most prominently, an increase in muscle size “indiscriminately improves the ability to produce force for most velocities, lengths, and contraction types [6].” In that regard the vast majority of trainees will benefit from an basic barbell based strength training program which relies on the concept of progessive overload and thus the SRA principle. Simply because almost nobody has ever applied this process long and effectively enough to exhaust his strength potential. While those sorts of strength programs are straight forward, sport specific strength programs are per definition very complicated due to the underlying specifics. I would argue that a strength coach who is not able to exhaust the potential given by a general barbell program cannot be trusted to establish a much more involved sport specific program. That is why those approaches usually fail.
To give an example, a couple years ago an article went through the media describing how incredibly strong Steph Curry was as he was able to (Trap bar) deadlift 400 lbs which was as much or more than anybody else on his championship team. Wouldn’t he benefit more easily from getting his Deadlift up by 50 lbs than from proceeding with weekly hours and hours of more sport specific training? Also, if a strength coach is not able to generate a 400+ lbs Deadlifter in a whole team of top 1% athletes how could he be able to install the much more difficult task of establishing an effective sport specific program?
Anyhow, unless you are a tightrope acrobat or a surfer, training on an unstable surface is not even specific to your sport, so why those kinds of exercises are widely considered functional in terms of Basketball still remains unclear.
Let’s further apply the Two Factor Model to Basketball. Practice, beyond that which is necessary to teach players basic shooting, passing, and ball-handling skills, takes place on the court. Training for the strength component of Basketball is important too, among other things for being able to prevail in the low-post or rebounding or the prevention of injuries. Training for Basketball also has to involve a conditioning component. Since basketball practice involves running and sprinting, and there are several games a week during the season, both Practice and performance have a profound Training effect on the conditioning aspect of the game. In that regard, Rippetoe even goes so far as to question whether non-practice conditioning is even necessary or rather counterproductive. That is a valid point if you consider that there is only so much stress your body can recover from and that this recovery capacity might be more productively spent with strength training.
We have explored that to improve strength we need to apply stress that is designed properly to trigger the necessary physical adaptations. Designed properly means that maximum force production must be trained which is achieved during squatting heavy sets of around five reps and not during submaximal explosive contractions like jumping with a light barbell on your back. Only heavy lifting recruits a maximum number of motor units into contraction leading to maximum force production.
The most effective tools to train for strength are barbells which can be incrementally loaded one pound at a time thus allowing the progressive increase of the stress each workout without changing the nature of the stress. Since Basketball, like any other sport, involves all the muscles in your body, the most efficient way to train is in terms of compound movements which also recruite many muscle groups and ideally require a natural balance component. Those lifts also enable you to move the most weight over the longest effective range of motion and by incorporating a great amount of muscle mass they allow for a long-term progression. The major compound lifts are essentially the Squat, Deadlift, Press, and Bench Press [1]. Especially for an athlete, there is another useful set of barbell lifts that should be performed — the Olympic lifts or their derivatives. Those are explosive movements that rely on the expression of power. During the Power Clean, for example, a barbell must be accelerated so that the load’s momentum carries it high enough to rack it on the shoulders. Acceleration is a function of force production. To the limited capacity that power is trainable, Olympic lifts are useful to transform acquired strength to your ability to display power.
Numerous well-established barbell-based training programs exist and will result in strength improvements. Nevertheless, I like to refer you to a straightforward method called The Starting Strength Linear Progression which is a natural application of the points discussed above. The program’s beauty is its simplicity as it only incorporates five basic barbell exercises, plus chin-ups. All details are given in the books [1,2] or a strongly comprehended version in this article [7].
To summarize: Effective strength training requires a few progressively loaded basic barbell exercises that use the whole skeletal system and it looks essentially the same for all sports. It is well established that this kind of training leads to an increase in muscle size which indiscriminately improves the ability to produce force for all velocities, lengths, and contraction types.
Sport specific strength training, on the other hand, aims at implementing specific exercises, training velocities and joint angles to meet the demands of the principle of sport specificity. At the very best, those programs are impractical to adequately set up and should therefore be reserved for very advanced athletes who have otherwise mainly exhausted their potential to gain muscle mass and strength due to basic barbell training. Usually, the idea of sport specific programming leads to the common misunderstanding that weight room activities must look familiar to a given sport, which results in clips of (profesional) athletes performing silly looking exercises using light weights on unstable surfaces. This approach provides neither Training nor Practice, since such activities are not hard enough or progressive enough to produce an accumulating physiological strength adaptation and their movement patterns are not specific to any sport.
References
[1] Starting Strength Basic Barbell Training 3rd Edition by Mark Rippetoe
[2] Practical Programming for Strength Training Vol. 3 by Mark Rippetoe & Andy Baker
[3] The Two-Factor Model of Sports Performance by Mark Rippetoe (https://startingstrength.com/article/the-two-factor-model-of-sports-performance)
[4] Strength and its Derivatives by Mark Rippetoe (https://startingstrength.com/article/the-two-factor-model-of-sports-performance)
[5] The Biggest Training Fallacy of All by Mark Rippetoe (https://startingstrength.com/article/training_vs_exercise)
[6] Strength is Specific: The key to optimal strength training for sports by Chris Beardsley
[7] Get started (https://startingstrength.com/get-started)
